Double-You Double-You One

I’m writing a book that begins in 1918. Yesterday, after I typed out “WWI” for the tenth time, it started to look very … wrong. Was it the “I” looking too spindly next to the big fat “W”? Or did it just seem wrong to call a monumental, global convulsion, in which sixteen million people died, by a nickname that looked a little too much like the World Wrestling Federation logo? I skidded to a halt, staring at my computer screen, trying to figure out how to write “World War One” properly.

The one thing I’ve discovered about social media is that people love answering questions. In fact, it sometimes feels like at any given moment, millions of people are online who have been waiting for exactly the question you fire off. The answers came gushing in five seconds after my sheepish Twitter request for a copy-editing genius to set me straight. First of all, I learned immediately, never, ever is it called W.W.I. (for that matter, although no one mentioned it, it is also never, ever written as 1st World War). A number of people suggested I use “First World War,” a locution I found a bit foreign, and for good reason: most people offering that construction confessed to being Canadian. (By the way, New Yorker house style is “First World War,” which makes me wonder whether the magazine should be renamed The Canadian.) Moments later, an American linguist living in Britain piped up, explaining that “World War I” is four times more common in American English than “First World War,” and the reverse in British English. The battle raged all afternoon. One camp maintained that A.P. style is “WWI”, while another, attacking from the flank, claimed that “World War I” is standard.

“You could say: ‘The War to End All Wars.’ ”

“Here’s an easy way around it: write books set in the present day, dummy!”

“Hardcore historical types call it the Great War. At the time they weren’t planning for a second one…”

“The Trench War.”

“WWI. That’s what vets call it.”

“I find it weird to put a 1 after the title of anything. It shows an arrogant expectation of a sequel. They never said Superman 1.”

Later in the day, someone sent me a listing in the "Military Glossary and Style Guide," which said,

WARSUppercase the following:Korean WarPersian Gulf WarVietnam WarWorld War I, World War II

That swayed me. I decided I would find-and-replace all my references to “WWI” with “World War I.” As peculiar as “WWI” had been looking earlier in the day, “World War I” was starting to look solid and familiar and correct, although one enthusiastic responder gave me a final moment of indecision. “Hey,” he wrote, as breezy as if we had been running a name-the-puppy contest, “I think calling it The Great War is cool.”

Photograph: German N.C.O.s drink wine, feast on gherkins, and play cards while wearing gas masks sometime during the First World War. Via drakegoodman on Flickr.

Susan Orlean began contributing articles to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 1992.